September 28, 2017

Some of you can’t help knowing, and some of you tell me that you want to know, about the emergency that we are under at the moment here. In today’s program, the host, Matthew, gives a very good summary update on what has happened since his editorial last Thursday. But we three guests, an Englishman, a German, and an American weren’t exactly shrinking violets (and we did sometimes differ with each other). Obviously, the Spanish Prime Minister’s visit to the American President, a very great disaster for him who spent so many billion euros to get so little, was something that we had to talk about. But the main subject is naturally the suspension of many civil rights here in the run-up to Sunday’s scheduled referendum on independence. The very newsroom on the other side of the studio wall has in fact been visited by the traditionally feared Guardia Civil, and we considered that we might be interrupted (as a meeting that I attended here in Sitges on improved social services was invaded by twelve armed police). But we weren’t one of the media censored so far:

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August 20, 2017

Photos of Charlottesville

I am part of the post-War “baby boom,” so I’ve been around a while. But in my whole life, I’ve never heard anything like the amount of talk about “white supremacy” that I’ve heard in the past week. But I’ve lived it. We may soften it to “white privilege,” but the one is based on the other. As a person identified as “white,” I have unconsciously but inevitably been preferred in many situations from the day I was born. It’s unavoidable. But what is avoidable is to remain unconscious of it.

There have been situations in which I could make sure that I didn’t take advantage of my genetics personally. The whole society has already done enough of that for me. This is not, of course, a purely American problem, though I must say that Americans have explicitly agonized over it more than most other societies have—with however limited profit from our often quite theatrical self-flagellation. I must also point out that one of the dodges that the American establishment has often employed is to assume that this is mostly a Southern problem.

Having lived in both North and South, each for substantial periods of my life, I would insist that the problem is equal but different in each place. The lines are increasingly blurred, but the traditional and instructive distinction was put well by someone whom I forget: “The Southerner says to the black man, ‘You can come as close as you want, but don’t come higher,’ while the Northerner says, ‘You can come as high as you want, but don’t come close.'” Both are senseless products of attitudes based on something as meaningless as skin color. Hence, a white supremacy that decently educated people don’t believe in even as we live in a world of white privilege.

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August 16, 2017

Scandal emanating from the White House is now so rife, that we are bound to become either wounded by it or hardened to it. As never before in my time, we are in danger of becoming merely cynical, which is not a humane state to operate in. A friend of mine has just published these words:

People tend to think of scandal as any public embarrassment that results from misbehavior. It’s a term of art for public relations, as people and institutions seek to “manage” scandal.

But the Catechism of the Catholic Church has a more exacting definition: “Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil.” Far from being merely a misdeed held up for public opprobrium, a shocker, or a public relations nightmare to be managed, a scandal is specifically a wrongdoing which causes another to stumble and fall. The Greek word “scandalon” from which our English word scandal is derived means a snare of an enemy.

She is referring to scandals in the Church, but the problem is also acute in United States political life to an extent that I’ve never known before. We “stumble and fall” when we become coldly cynical.

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August 9, 2017

A few minutes ago, I was swimming in the sea and the head of another person who was, like me, swimming on his back, collided with my own head. We both laughed, and he apologized profusely in perfect English. He then immediately asked me where I was from, and I said that I live here. I thought it only polite to ask him where he was from, and he said that he was a Cuban living in Moscow. He said he was a doctor and he lived there partly because the education for women was so good (supposedly pointing as he said it to two people whom he identified as his wife and daughter but whom I couldn’t see without lenses). I mumbled something about how we always hear about the excellence of Cuban medicine. “Oh, I wasn’t trained in Cuba but in the States.” He then said that he no longer practices medicine because he is so busy with business affairs. I said, laughing, “And because you’re so busy going around bumping heads with people,” and headed for dry land, all smiles.

I thought of a line of Fanny Brice’s mother in Funny Girl: “Strangers should be strange.” I don’t entirely agree with that, but there’s something to it. I couldn’t help feeling that this guy was up to something. Then, as I walked home, it occurred to me that I might be influenced by current news about Russians being up to something and Americans who get caught up with them. I like to think that I’m as free of nationalistic prejudices as a person can be, but this brief episode made me wonder.

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March 19, 2017

Why does nearly everyone still talk as though this represents a “failure” of Trump & Co.? His senior advisor, Stephen Bannon has said, as clearly as language can say it, that the object is to destroy absolutely everything and to rebuild it from its ashes as Lenin did. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” What is more representative of the establishment of international democracy than the alliance between the United States and Great Britain—destruction of which could only be confirmed by destroying the relationship with the European continent’s leading democracy, Germany?

At every stage, people have refused to believe the plain words of the Trump circle about their evil intentions and assumed that they are failing because they continue to do what they said they’d do. The distinguished British diplomat says that Trump’s actions are “gratuitously damaging.” What part of the promise to “bring everything crashing down” does he not understand? We must not continue to console outselves that Trump is just a floundering failure.

The full article from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/19/white-house-trump-wiretap-uk-ambassador-peter-westmacott?CMP=share_btn_fb

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March 16, 2017

So, today we naturally talked about yesterday’s Dutch elections that have so many resonances on both sides of the Atlantic. Also, the attacks on democratic votes further south; and there was talk, too, about a new movie on a great Catalan novel that sounds sensational. (And, uniquely so far, both guests—an Englishman and an American—were from Sitges. We’re quite different ideologically but seem pretty much in sync in the issues at hand.)

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March 1, 2017

In 1749, in the great Catalan cathedral city of Girona forty-three miles from the French border, Baldiri Reixac i Carbó (1703–1781) published an influential book that has gone into twenty editions. It was a visionary guide to the education of children and youths that displayed the influence of the Enlightenment, a French-led movement that largely bypassed the normal educational process in Spanish-ruled territories. Among many other things, the text deals with the right motives and means for studying languages. Reixac stressed that, at home and at school (where he urged instruction by “persuasion rather than fear”), pupils should be learning five languages. He gave a different reason for each:

Their own language, because Catalan brings “a great ability to learn and understand other languages”—this despite the outlawing of official use of Catalan by the Bourbon monarchy’s decrees earlier in the century.

Latin, because “it is used at all the universities and academies.”

“Within the Kingdom of Spain,” Castilian is effective equipment for a salesman there.

French,”because it is obvious that France now rules all the sciences and arts to perfection”—which showed his adherence to the ideas then being formlated for the Encyclopedie.

And, finally, Italian, in order to “go to Rome” and “to recreate the spirit, when you are tired of other occupations.”

Thus a man of international vision and broad culture saw each language as bestowing its own characteristic gifts and having its own distinctive uses. And nowadays people who are doggedly monolingual are often deemed “educated” and commonly rule the fate of nations.